


supernova

by disorderedorder



Category: Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi
Genre: F/M, Gentleness, Morning Cuddles, Post-TLJ, honestly just 3k words of much-needed softness, kylo's inner conflict
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-30 23:19:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13962252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disorderedorder/pseuds/disorderedorder
Summary: love, let's talk about love,is it anything and everything you hoped for?





	supernova

**Author's Note:**

> oops you thought I was gone didn't you lol
> 
> [here's](https://star-wars.ambient-mixer.com/kylo-ren-s-private-rooms) something to listen to while you read too

In space, the only way to tell time is by the clocks. Outside, it’s always dark, a perpetual night with the occasional trip around a star bright enough to light the bridge enough into fooling its passengers into a false daylight. But most stars are too bright, and too close to the ship to really feel like what the day is meant to feel like; the light is always too intense and too warm to fool the crew into the comfort of a true daytime light. Lately, all light has felt too false to you. The bright, fluorescent lights of the ship, the too-bright stars, the dim emergency lights at the base of your quarters are all too artificial to you. You miss waking up to a sun rising outside your windows, the warmth of it filtering through as you’re greeted with a new morning, the dawning of a new day, and the previous one gone and passed. You miss the sunsets, when the sky is transformed into a painting of blues and oranges and yellows, the navy blue creeping on the horizon as night approaches. Everything about living on a planet that you cherish is stripped away on a ship like the Finalizer, and you find yourself missing it the more the days go on.

Beside you, the man in bed stirs, jostling the blankets piled high on your bed. He sighs softly in his sleep, and you feel the mattress shift as he rolls over, readjusts his pillows as he nuzzles back into them. You reach out, gently brushing your fingers against his bare back, feeling the warmth of his skin. He burns hotter than the stars, you think, and sometimes you wonder how he hasn’t burned himself into a supernova yet, what with all he tries to do in what little time he has. In the past week or so, he’s woken up well past eleven hundred hours, sleep-deprived and nearly dead on his feet. Without you beside him, he wakes up with terrible nightmares, night terrors that refuse to cease when he’s alone. He feels guilt, regret, an ache inside that not even you can help him fix. During the nights he sleeps by your side, he spends half of it awake, staring at the low, pulsing light of your ceiling until the auto-shutoff, and when it goes off, he turns on his side and watches the dim glow of the emergency lights until sleep pulls him under. Sometimes, he speaks to you, but most of the time, he’s silent. He exudes a need for the bliss of silence, but something tells you that when he’s too silent, his intruding thoughts only become that much more dangerous.

You brush your fingers across his back again, and this time, he stirs, groaning softly as he rolls over in bed again, this time to face you. His eyes are closed, his dark lashes a dark fan over his pale, flushed cheeks. His eyebrows are crinkled; he looks troubled, but you know he’s simply a little frustrated that you made him readjust in bed. The dark waves of his hair are a corona of curls around his head, the depth of them a stark contrast to his pale skin. Bisecting his face is the scar you’ve come to know as well as one of your own, that cuts through the left side of his face, down to his chest. Other scars on his chest and arms are more visible than the one on his face, but you know the significance of that one. He’s refused to tell you about the others for the time being. His lips are the color of the inside of the roses from your homeworld, a soft petal-pink that appears soft to the touch. Dark moles dot his face like a negative image of the sky outside. Your eyes travel lower, to the broad expanse of his chest, exposed by the sheets and blankets pulled down to his waist. The sheen of sweat on his skin is an indication he spent the night trapped in his horrible dreams once again, despite his stillness as he slept.

Asleep, he appears less threatening to you. There’s a gentleness, a softness, a vulnerability that’s there when he’s not awake, and something about it is more sad than it is beautiful to you. Supreme Leader he may be, but when he sleeps, he appears to be the loneliest creature in the galaxy to you. In his sleep, he presses his lips together like he does when he’s troubled, and he sighs raggedly, prompting you to press a hand gently to his chest. His heart is beating too quickly for his slumber to be peaceful, and you push at him a bit, trying to rouse him from sleep. He grunts, lazily swats at your hand with his own as he begins breathing more quickly. The weight of his hand is enough to push you away completely, but you’re not easily prevented. You press at him again, this time murmuring his name, asking him to wake up, please. His brows furrow together again, but this time, his eyes open, too. Something about them never fails to take your breath away, each time you look at them, no matter how many times it happens. The darkness on the edges that fades into the golden towards the pupils, the ring of gold that’s so bright it could be glowing.

He’s focused on you now, getting his bearings as he pulls himself from his dreams and into reality. He lets out a few shaky breaths before he reaches out to you, his hand brushing your hair back from your face as he studies you. Every morning when you wake him up begins like this, and you often wonder why he spends so much time focusing on your face, seemingly as much as you focus on his when he’s asleep. He’s a remarkable man, and you’re a former officer and a current companion to the Supreme Leader. You hold no rank, no position, no official title within the Order, and in contrast, he holds the galaxy and its inhabitants in one hand and his saber in the other. It’s enough to make you wonder, sometimes, if you do enough for him to keep him happy with you. By no means do you serve no purpose; you’ve been told many times that without you, the Supreme Leader wouldn’t be nearly as controlled as he is now, and you know that he wouldn’t allow anyone else to lay beside him like this, studying him as you wait for him to wake. Now, as he brushes his fingers against your cheek in a similar manner to the way you touched his back previously, the hint of a smile pulls at his lips.

“Nightmares?” you ask, and he responds by pulling you closer, tucking you against the warmth of his chest as he pulls the blankets over the both of you, tucking them in around you.

“Nothing worse than the usual,” he says, resting his chin on the top of your head as he strokes your hair. You nuzzle into the crook of his neck as his strokes threaten to lull you back into slumber again.

“Kylo,” you say, unintentionally sounding a bit maternal. “You’re supposed to tell me when they get bad again.”

His arm that’s wrapped around you rubs gentle circles into your back, the width of it spanning halfway across your shoulders. You’re soothed by the intimacy of the moment, but nothing can change the fact that he’s still damp with sweat and his heart rate is decreasing too slowly for him to truly be calming down. You close your eyes as you wrap your arms around his chest, gently running your nails up and down his back. He purrs softly as he buries his face in your hair, breathing in the scent of the regulation shampoo. It’s not a pleasant nor unpleasant scent, you know, but it’s often too bland for you, and it leaves you missing the scented oils from your home that have been banned by the Order. Of course, you could always ask him for them, but you don’t know how far you should push your privileges, considering you’re already allowed to do a long list of things that even high-ranking officers can’t do.

“You’re so quiet,” you say. “Tell me what happened on the Supremacy.” Ever since Supreme Leader Snoke’s death and the loss of the Supremacy, he’d fallen into long periods of uncomfortable, unsettling silence, often for hours or even days at a time. It had worried you, made you wonder if he was plotting something against the Order, or dealing with his conflicts again without telling you, thus leaving him at the mercy of his intrusive thought. He lets out a breath, and you can feel the heat of his breath in your hair and his chest expanding as he does.

“You were right to remain on board the Finalizer for it,” he says simply. “Losing you would have been my greatest loss.”

“But what happened?” you press, but he shakes his head.

“Another time, Little One,” he says. “Let me rest. I like holding you like this.”

“Kylo,” you say, but he cuts you off with the touch of his hand against the side of your neck that makes you shiver. He resumes purring, and you drift off a few times as he continues to soothe you.

“I should be the one comforting you, not the other way around,” you murmur.

“I am comforted,” he insists. “I’m comforted when you’re here.”

“Then can we talk?” you ask. “The silence...your silence is deafening as of late. Do you even realize you do it?”

“Do you feel like I’m shutting you out?” he replies softly.

“Sometimes.”

You’re as honest as you can be with him, as honest as you dare. One thing you promised yourself is that no matter what, you would stay candid with your feelings that were solely focused on him, no matter how risky. When it comes from you, he never takes it badly, though he has turned away and left you alone for over twenty-four hours before he returned to you, seemingly having forgotten about the comments you made that unsettled him in the first place.

“I don’t mean to,” he says. “I forget that not everyone can hear my thoughts.”

“I wish I could,” you say. “Then I could understand.”

He pauses, as if to cultivate a proper answer for you. “I don’t think you could,” he says, after a moment of silence. “Not even I fully understand what my thoughts are trying to tell me.”

“Is it the Force that makes them unclear?” you ask. You know very little about the Force, other than its basic concepts. It’s something that he’s offered to teach you about in the past, but there’s never been enough downtime for it.

“I don’t know,” he sighs. “Not everything is clear for me.”

His hand at your neck threads through your hair, detangling it gently as he runs his fingers through it. The gesture is nothing new; you’re used to his need to feel you, whether it be sexual or not. More often than not, you’ve walked the length of the ship with your hand in his as he loses himself in his thoughts. A gentle squeeze of his hand is all he needs as a reminder that you’re there, but every so often, you’ll feel the same squeeze against your hand when he wants time alone. You’ve learned the meaning of every little gesture of his so that you’re always at the ready with whatever he might need in the moment. Some people believe it’s a one-way beneficial thing, that you’re nearly the same as a therapy animal, but despite their words, you know it’s so much more. The time you spend alone with him extends your relationship beyond normal friendship, but you can’t say clearly whether or not it’s a romantic relationship.

“I know you won’t tell me about the Supremacy,” you say. “But what happened with...the girl?” you ask. An ugly feeling blooms in your chest as you get the words out, and no amount of control can mask the obvious contempt there.

“A mistake. A waste of my time,” he replies without pause. “Nothing you need to concern yourself with.”

  
You don’t answer, simply listen to the beating of his heart as he nuzzles you. The concern is still present, still eating away at you along with the feeling of the unknown and what you’ve been denied to know. You press your lips together, letting out a sigh as you attempt to curl away from him. You’d rather he not see your emotions displayed so openly on your face.

“Wait,” he says, when he feels you moving. “Are you—were you jealous?” he asks.

“I…” you start, unsure of how to phrase it without sounding horrible and vindictive. “I worry about you, Kylo. That’s all.”

He’s quiet for a long few minutes as he tucks your blankets in again, wraps one around your bare shoulders to protect you from the cold. His hair tickles your cheek, the overgrown strands damp with sweat, and you make a mental note to suggest a shower together later. It’s one of the few ways you can get him to temporarily forget about outside distractions and settle down for a while. Oddly, not even suggesting getting a meal together is enough to calm him down sometimes, but suggesting a shower together almost always does. Rarely has he ever turned the suggestion down, and in the times he has, it’s often out of his inability to clear his schedule, not a lack of desire.

“You don’t need to worry,” Kylo says. “I’m sorry if I concerned you.”

You know that while he means well, nothing can truly make you forget the ugly feeling in your chest, the cold hand around your heart, the burning behind your eyes when he mentions it. No one else dares to, but you know the rumors, nasty rumors that threaten to push you into an anger nearly as strong as his. But the gentle stroking of your hair, the hand rubbing your back, and the lips at your temple keep you sane, pull you back down to the Finalizer and out of the burning core that is your mind. His uncharacteristic gentleness, reserved only for you, made you wary at first. You weren’t sure if he was doing it to get something from you, whether it be sex, credits, or to have a no-strings-attached companion to be at his beck and call. But as time progressed, despite all he still refused to talk about, you realized it was something more.

“Your mind is so quiet,” he murmurs. “Everything is so clear.”

“I never realized,” you reply. “I always feel like you think so loudly.”

“I do,” he says. “But being around you makes it quieter.”

You lay together for a long time, his arms keeping you close to him, his gentle breaths in your hair, the soft ambience of the room soothing and quiet enough to pull you back under into a light sleep. You doze more than you really sleep, and around you, you’re keenly aware of the warmth of his skin on yours, the gentle humming of the ship and the faint screeching of the TIE fighters, the dryness of your mouth, the lingering smell of whatever non-regulation soap he managed to smuggle onto the ship for his personal use. The moment is fleeting, and you know that sooner or later, it will end, with him untangling himself from you to step into the shower while you put in an order for breakfast to be delivered to his private office before joining him in the shower. Days like this seem to all run together, making it easy for you to lose track of what day and month it is.

In space, it’s hard for you to keep the days apart, hard for you to instinctively know what time of day it is, hard to remember it off the top of your head. Outside, the cold vacuum of space looms, a deadly void that seems to consume all it surrounds. But there is a beauty to it, something you never had on your homeworld. The Finalizer is less homey and more industrial, something that makes you aware that everything on it has a place and there is a place for everyone and everything on it. But the disorder of the man next to you makes things less of a strain for you. You don’t always have to force yourself to be perfect, to be ‘in your place’ when you’re with him. His entire being is disorderly, unhinged, unorganized, and that in its entirety is a welcome change from the stuffiness of the Order and the pressure it puts on its crew.

The gentle hand on your back moves to your waist, long fingers running over the inward curve of it, light as fabric, and the lips at your temple press gentle kisses close to your forehead. Underneath the blankets, his legs are twined with yours, your thighs trapped between his as he traps you, your feet pressed into the back of his knees. He wears nothing but a pair of black shorts to bed, despite his complaints that the rooms are always too cold, even with you there with him. Still, he shivers less than he tosses and turns in the night.

“Little One,” he murmurs sleepily.

“Yes, Kylo?” He purrs when you say his name, like he always does.

“I want to stay in,” he answers.

“Then stay in,” you say. “No one will stop you.”

“With you,” he adds.

You nuzzle back into the crook of his neck. “Then I will too.”

He hums gently in satisfaction as he folds the blankets in around you again. “Love you.”

It’s the first time he’s ever said the words to you. 

**Author's Note:**

> I was feeling a need for some soft Kylo, and _gasp_ it's my first non-explicit work in a long time. I'm actually hoping to work more on stuff like this so my writing has a little more substance than pwp works lol. I also made an ambient noise mix found [here](https://star-wars.ambient-mixer.com/kylo-ren-s-private-rooms), so if you'd like, put it on while you read this short little thing I churned out. and as always, my [tumblr](http://supremeleaderdaddy.tumblr.com/)


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